.comment: A Dead End and a Milestone, or "What's Up, .doc?" - page 2

Documents Check In, But They Don't Check Out

August 29, 2001

By
Dennis E. Powell

But just as we cannot in good manners complain over the lack
of a particular feature when we are using the fine programs of
developers who work in large part for the sheer love of the art,
we also cannot be certain that our heart's desire won't appear in
the CVS tree tomorrow. The aspect of Linux that is at once both
maddening and delightful is that it is constantly being
developed, with the results instantly available. I build the KDE
CVS tree every week or two, and as a result do not know if I ever
actually had KDE-2.2. I know I had versions very close to the
release version, and may have had the actual release for a week
or so, but I'm not sure. I'm currently running a version that
identifies itself as KDE-2.2.1pre.

And if the schedule holds, on Friday the KDE CVS tree's
"head" branch will take a step unlike any it has taken
in more than two years. On that day, the main branch of KDE
development will officially switch to QT-3.0 (well, the current
pre-release version of QT-3.0).

This is a Big Deal. It is the first externally obvious step
toward KDE3.

I remember when, a couple of years ago, the switch from
QT-1.44 to a beta of QT-2.0 came. There was no shortage of
confusion as people discovered that they couldn't build the daily
snapshots (CVS wasn't as widely used back then) using their
existing QT, and they couldn't use their existing KDE-1.x if they
upgraded to the QT-2.0 beta. Recipes for getting the two to run
on the same machine were published.

Fortunately, I was in the middle of another book then, about
KDE-1.x, so I didn't have the opportunity to play with KDE2, as
it was then called, in the really early days. (For what it's
worth, my superb editors, Gretchen Ganser and Hugh Vandivier,
were extremely helpful in porting their template to StarOffice,
so I didn't have to use the dreaded Windows for that book.) But
once the author review circus had left town and my part of the
book was completed, I instantly downloaded and built both the new
QT and the beginnings of KDE2. A lot of stuff didn't work yet,
that second week of November 1999, and a lot of stuff was
broken. Sometimes a build seemed more like a step backwards, so
keeping the most recent working version was a very good idea. But
from the first day I built it, I never had to return to
KDE-1.x. For a few months there it seemed almost as if using a
system where everything worked would be boring and unexciting.

Then, gradually, almost imperceptibly, things began to work,
and work well. It just got better and better. People produced
amazing new features (some, like themes, seemed pretty pointless
at the time, but today I would not like to be without Mosfet's
"Liquid" theme which, though sadly no longer part of
the KDE distribution, is still available from him). Sound
support, pretty rough at first, got reliable. It's too bad that
there's no software equivalent of time-lapse photography, for if
there were, watching KDE2 grow from its beginning to where it is
today, as we can watch a tomato grow from hole in the ground to
ripe fruit, would be a delight.

And now it's about to begin again. There will still be
versional confusion, and for awhile stuff will be unreliable, but
it will probably be a lot smoother than it was last time. Many of
these guys have been through this before. I just now dropped by
the developers gallery on the KDE page and looked at the
pictures, most taken years ago, of the audacious young developers
who got together -- was it four years ago already? -- and decided
to build the first fully integrated desktop for Linux and any
other operating systems that cared to tag along. Looking at their
mailing list posts today, they seem every bit as full of piss and
vinegar as they were in the days before the release of KDE-1.0 in
1998.

What innovations will KDE3 bring to the desktop? It's
impossible to know. QT-3.0 will have enhanced support for
threading, and there is much room for exploration in that
direction. People are already posting their wishlists for KDE3 on
the KDE developers list. Certainly, many of KDE's legacy
applications will be ported over, and it appears that the path to
porting is fairly straightforward. But we return to that
maddening, delightful Linux phenomenon, where marketing studies
and careful plans for achieving market share take a back seat to
those things that people, limited only by their imaginations and
skills, want to write. KOffice will become more
sophisticated. And, as with that first, pea-sized green June
tomato, it will all always seem closer than it will turn out to
be.

My work on this book ought to have gotten through the hateful
author review by early November. I'll celebrate by downloading
and building the head branch. A lot will be broken, and some
stuff will be absent entirely. But somehow I doubt that I'll even
look back.